The importance of the upgrade of the ETH Ethereum protocol centered around Rollup is gradually diminishing

Original author: Christine, Galaxy Research

Original translation: Ismay, BlockBeats

Editor’s note: As Ethereum gradually transitions to a Rollup-centric development roadmap, the importance of its protocol changes is gradually diminishing. This article delves into the reasons for this shift and its potential impact on the ecosystem. By analyzing the changing priorities of Ethereum’s protocol developers, the author reveals that the direct impact on users from protocol-level changes will decrease as Rollup matures. The article also cites the perspective of Aya Miyaguchi, Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, emphasizing the reduced risk and necessity of protocol and foundation roles. At the same time, the article points out that the core building blocks of future finance are being constructed outside the protocol, and Rollup and other innovative technologies will gradually surpass the importance of Ethereum upgrades in the ecosystem.

The following is the original text:

Christine Kim from Galaxy Research attended the 7th annual ETH Community Conference (EthCC), which was held in Brussels, Belgium for the first time. The change in the conference venue this year was to avoid conflicting with the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France. Jerome de Tychey, the chairman of ETH France, announced on the last day of EthCC that the conference will not return to Paris next year. EthCC[8] will be held in Cannes, France, a brand new destination, in 2025.

In this note, Christine shares her main takeaways and learnings from the EthCC conference.

The Future Impact of Rollup-Centric Parsing

At this year’s EthCC conference, I gained an important understanding of Ethereum protocol development. The roadmap centered around Rollup means that the impact of changes to the Ethereum protocol on end users will decrease over time. This is a fairly obvious and positive conclusion for the ecosystem in many ways, but there are some lesser-known and potentially challenging truths hidden within that are worth exploring.

As Ethereum protocol developers increasingly focus on optimizing data availability (DA), other parts of the Ethereum ecosystem will reduce their following and participation in protocol development.

For users, Ethereum will become less relevant as an execution layer, as they will migrate to Rollup as the main point of contact for value transfer and interacting with decentralized applications (dapps). The primary responsibility for improving user experience, such as transaction speed, ordering, and confirmation, will mainly lie with the Rollup development team.

Therefore, the most important upgrade for users will occur on Rollup, not on the ETH network. On the ETH network, developers will prioritize improving the protocol as a DA layer feature. In fact, this has already been reflected in the code changes in the Dencun and Pectra upgrades.

As protocol developers increasingly focus on optimizing Data Availability (DA), the technology required to achieve a breakthrough in the user experience of Ethereum will be mainly built by the Rollup team rather than the client team. All the buzzwords attracting investors’ and developers’ attention at EthCC, such as maximal extractable value (MEV), Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), account abstraction, intent, and pre-commitment, are weakening as the correlation of Ethereum at the DA layer, and the correlation of Rollup as the next major Crypto Assets adopter is increasing.

Innovative solutions and cutting-edge technologies developed by core development teams outside of ETH will increasingly be led by protocol developers and client teams as they work on Rollup to address the most challenging issues in encryption user experience. This will continue to advance the mission of ETH protocol, even as its use cases and functionalities become increasingly narrow.

High-profile Ethereum core developers such as Ben Edgington and ‘Protolambda’, as well as client teams like Prysmatic Labs, have now come to the conclusion and are now working full-time for the Rollup team.

As protocol developers increasingly focus on optimizing data availability (DA), their visibility and influence on driving the value and spirit of product and application development on the Ethereum network will decrease.

Throughout most of Ethereum’s history, code changes activated through hard forks have had a direct impact on user behavior. Protocol developers have adjusted the prices of certain opcodes, introduced new precompiles, and removed features such as gas refunds.

While many Rollups today pay close attention to imitating the execution environment of Ethereum, as Ethereum is reshaped into a Layer-2 solution, their maturity will lead to greater deviations. Due to competition and constantly changing regulatory environments, the same values that guided Ethereum as a design choice for emerging general-purpose blockchains may not necessarily have the same impact on Rollups. As the user base of Ethereum migrates to Rollups, protocol developers must recognize that the ability to affect and correct on-chain user behavior through protocol changes will be reduced.

The diminishing importance of Ethereum upgrades

As protocol developers increasingly focus on the Rollup-centric roadmap, the importance of protocol changes on the ETH network will gradually diminish. In many ways, minimizing the role of ETH in the ecosystem is similar to minimizing the role of the ETH Foundation in the ecosystem.

It is risky to reduce the role of the protocol in order to help expand the coverage of the protocol, but it is also necessary for Decentralization. This is a vision of Ethereum, as explained by Aya Miyaguchi, Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, when she talks about her vision for the Ethereum Foundation.

The best part of Ethereum is its Decentralization, which presents unique challenges to the ecosystem. I consider subtraction as a strategy to achieve two main goals… The first goal is to seek the right balance. Building an Ethereum Foundation empire and solving all problems ourselves may make us look good in the short term, but it would make others feel that this ecosystem is not built for everyone, and the Ethereum Foundation would become a single point of failure. If we keep growing, the ecosystem will always rely on the Ethereum Foundation.

At EthCC, there are a lot of merch activities, which is not a new phenomenon during Europe’s largest Ethereum conference. However, this year’s merch activities are more important than ever, becoming the main event to showcase new ideas, experiment with technology, and discuss topics most relevant to Ethereum users.

Although protocol developers were well represented at EthCC and Ethereum as a protocol was a headline on the EthCC agenda, it was not the main focus for many attendees during the conference week. This is because the building blocks of the future of finance are being built elsewhere, outside of the protocol.

Therefore, even though Ethereum protocol developers may make radical and ambitious code changes to the core protocol, their correlation within the ecosystem should also diminish over time. It is now time to let the influence of innovative solutions and new technologies built on Rollup and beyond surpass the importance of Ethereum upgrades.

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